Hello,
I was wondering if it would be possible for me to persuade anyone to submit
me a *merged* alpha/sparc patch for XFree86 so I can put it in -10.
All I personally own is an i386 box. An integrated patch would also mean
that I don't apply one and then watch 100 rejects happen when I apply the
other one.
Also, if the alpha and sparc porting teams can do this, it reduces the
likelihood of weird side effects on i386 -- I figure that once you've
insulated two arches from each other, it makes it less likely that either of
them will work bad medicine on a third.
Finally for the really frank reasons: release time is really drawing nigh,
and it would be time consuming for me to handle this task myself. There
are a few other issues I want -10 to resolve -- which brings me to the
other really frank reason. I'm no C wizard -- but porters usually are, or
are at least more conversant with things like enforcement of aligned memory
access than I am.
This message is to Anders and Steve, who each have worked on these issues
before, but I'm cc'ing the respective port lists so they don't feel I'm
just dumping this back in their laps. Unless they say they don't want help
(mythical man-month issues?), let me issue this plea for folks to assist
them.
Once I have the integrated patch I will make a test build with it and
try to determine if it makes any weirdness happen to i386 systems (maybe
I'll leave it out of the changelog for the test build so the i386
testers will become unwitting guinea pigs of a bigger experiment than
they bargained for, moo ha ha ha). I'd also like to know if it breaks
on m68k, put those poor guys have to wait 6 days or something for X
to build, so I'm probably going to have to resort to prayer for that
architecture.
Anyway, I am cognizant of the non-i386 folks feeling like second-class
citizens and I want to do what I can to relieve that problem.
Fundamentally, though, I'm a control freak and I don't like to see NMU's
of X. But where I am not competent to handle something, I have to delegate
it. Hence this message.
Well, I've gone on long enough. Feel free to mail me with any questions,
especially about my psychotic maintainer scripts.
--
G. Branden Robinson | The only way to get rid of a temptation
Debian GNU/Linux | is to yield to it.
branden@ecn.purdue.edu | -- Oscar Wilde
cartoon.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |